Wings Over Scotland

He’s the cuddly, lovable character all of Scotland’s talking about, but what do we really know about the Hate Monster? Where did he come from? What’s his backstory? Well, the diligent research team at Wings have been hard at work, and we’re thrilled to bring you this rare archive footage of not one but BOTH of his parents.

Both were in the arts. Here’s his mum, Ruda (originally from Eastern Europe, escaping to the West before the Iron Curtain came down) starring in a 1952 Bugs Bunny short:

And this is his dad, in one of several collaborations with the Scooby Doo team in 1976 under his former wrestling persona of The 10,000-Volt Ghost:

Our boy was born for the stage. No wonder he’s made such an impact.

Everyone’s having a lot of fun with the farcical Hate Crime Act that will finally come into operation in Scotland in just a couple of weeks’ time, fittingly on April Fools’ Day.

Even by the Scottish Government’s abysmally rank standards of legislation over the last decade it’s an embarrassing binfire, with citizens being urged to rock up at fishmongers, mushroom farms and demolished tower blocks to report “hate crimes”.

And you’d have to laugh, except that might be a crime soon too.

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Well, it sure beats the broom-cupboard video.

Our apologies for the lack of recent activity here, readers, but there’s just been nothing happening worth talking about. Meanwhile, here’s some more music.

See you soon, hopefully.

This really is grim, folks. Remember the days when there had to be overflow rooms for the leader’s speech at the SNP conference, in venues holding thousands? Now they can’t come close to filling 750 seats in a 2000-seat arena.

The reception afforded to Sturgeon yesterday, who left the party in the pile of wreckage that the hapless Yousaf is still trying to stumble through, was a symptom of desperate people clinging forlornly to the shadow of better times, like an abandoned dog seeking the last bits of warmth and scent from its owner’s chair.

But those days are gone, never to return. This is the barren, foreboding autumn of the SNP, the cold ground thickly carpeted in the lifeless, crumbling and silent remains of lost members fallen from branches.

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The SNP put out this party political broadcast (PPB) last night.

And alert readers might already have noticed something odd.

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Following on from that unforgettable summer:

We’re sure that, like us, you can hardly wait.

I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.

They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.

There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:

(Warning: some adult content.)

Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.

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Luckily, someone else has already said it for us.

The haunting words of a dead man, brought to you again on the exact anniversary of the day William Wallace was hung, drawn and quartered at Smithfield in London for treason against the English crown.

Three deaths for the price of one. RIP.

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We’ve used this video before, but it’s extra-apt today.

Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.

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Three weeks of summer left.

How’s it been for you?

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